cross connect reliability

Thu Sep 17 21:54:35 UTC 2009

From: Michael J McCafferty [mailto:mike at m5computersecurity.com] 
> 
> All,
> 	Today I had yet another cross-connect fail at our colo 
> provider. From memory, this is the 6th cross-connect to
> fail while in service, in 4yrs and recently there was a
> bad SFP on their end as well. This seemes like a high
> failure rate to me. When I asked about the high failure
> rate, they said that they run a lot of cables and there
> is a lot of jiggling and wiggling... lots of chances to
> get bent out of whack from activity near my patches and
> cables.

> 	I am curious; what do you expect the average 
> reliability of your FastE
> or GigE copper cross-connects at a colo?

You're seeing these failures on copper?!  I've
worked in some places with absolute cabling
nightmares on the copper side of things in wiring
closets but those were all enterprise situations
and we still rarely had failures of ports and even
less on the wiring itself.  I'd never expect there
to be frequent copper issues in a colo where you
would not have anywhere near the volume of moving
cables around that goes on in an enterprise.

On the fiber side, your experience still seems high
although obviously much easier to damage fiber
cables.  Perhaps they have a big mess of a fiber
plant and have to fish tape new runs through it
and like to snag adjacent cables, etc.  It can only
get worse if that's the problem and they don't
clean it up.

David